The first she knew of the assault was a motion glimpsed from the corner of her eye: a 
blurred form approaching her at speed through the thickening sleet. Alarmed, she turned 
towards her attacker. She had time to recognize the face on | Third Avenue; then the man 
was upon her.
  She opened her mouth to yell, turning to retreat into the theater as she did so. The 
cleaner had gone. So had her shout, caught in her throat by the stranger's hands. They 
were expert. They hurt brutally, stopping every breath from being drawn. She panicked; 
flailed; toppled. He took her weight, controlling her motion. In desperation she threw 
the umbrella into the foyer, hoping there was somebody out of sight in the box office 
who'd be alerted to her jeopardy. Then she was wrenched out of shadow into heavier shadow 
still and realized it was almost too late already. She was becoming light-headed, her 
leaden limbs no longer hers. In the murk her assassin's face was once more a blur, with 
two dark holes bored in it. She fell towards them, wishing she had the energy to turn her 
gaze away from this blankness, but as he moved closer to her a little light caught his 
cheek and she saw, or thought she saw, tears there, spilling from those dark eyes. Then 
the light went, not just from his cheek but from the whole world. And as everything 
slipped away, she could only hold on to the thought that somehow her murderer knew who 
she was. . ..
  "Judith?"
  Somebody was holding her. Somebody was shouting to her. Not the assassin but Marlin. 
She sagged in his arms, catching dizzied sight of the assailant running across the 
pavement, with another man in pursuit. Her eyes swung back to Marlin, who was asking her 
if she was all right, then back to the street as brakes shrieked and the failed assassin 
was struck squarely by a speeding car, which reeled around, wheels locked and sliding 
over the sleet-greased street, throwing the man's body off the hood and over a parked 
car. The pursuer threw himself aside as the vehicle mounted the pavement, slamming into a 
lamppost.
  Jude put her arm out for some support other than Mar-fin, her fingers finding the wall. 
Ignoring his advice that she stay still, she started to stumble towards the place where 
her assassin had fallen. The driver was being helped from his smashed vehicle, unleashing 
a stream of obscenities as he emerged. Others were appearing on the scene to lend help in 
forming a crowd, but Jude ignored their stares and headed across the street, Marlin at 
her side. She was determined to reach the body before anybody else. She wanted to see it 
before it was touched; wanted to meet its open eyes and fix its dead expression; know it, 
for memory's sake.
  She found his blood first, spattered in the gray slush underfoot, and then, a little 
way beyond, the assassin himself, reduced to a lumpen form in the gutter. As she came 
within a few yards of it, however, a shudder passed down its spine and it rolled over, 
showing its face to the sleet. Then, impossible though this seemed, given the blow it had 
been struck, the form started to haul itself to its feet. She saw how bloodied it was, 
but she saw also that it was still essentially whole. It's not human, she thought, as it 
stood upright; whatever it is, it's not human. Marlin groaned with revulsion behind her, 
and a woman on the pavement screamed. The man's gaze went to the screamer, wavered, then 
returned to Jude.
  It wasn't an assassin any longer. Nor was it Gentle. If it had a self, perhaps this was 
its face: split by wounds and doubf pitiful; lost. She saw its mouth open and close as il 
it was attempting to address her. Then Marlin made a move to pursue it, and it ran. How, 
after such an accident, its limbs managed any speed at all was a miracle, but it was off 
at a pace that Marlin couldn't hope to match. He made a show of pursuit but gave up at 
the first intersection, returning to Jude breathless.
  "Drugs " he said, clearly angered to have missed his chance at heroism. "Fucker's on 
drugs. He's not feeling any pain. Wait till he comes down, he'll drop dead. Fucker! How 
did he know you?"
  "Did he?" she said, her whole body trembling now, as relief at her escape and terror at 
how close she'd come to losing her life both stung tears from her. "He called you 
Judith," Marlin said. In her mind's eye she saw the assassin's mouth open and close and 
on them read the syllables of her name.
  "Drugs," Marlin was saying again, and she didn't waste words arguing, though she was 
certain he was wrong. The only drug in the assassin's system had been purpose, and that 
would not lay him low, tonight or any other.
  
  
  4
  
  ELEVEN DAYS AFTER HE HAD TAKEN ESTABROOK to the encampment in Streatham, Chant realized 
he would soon be having a visitor. He lived alone, and anonymously, in a one-room flat on 
a soon-to-be-condemned estate close to the Elephant and Castle, an address he had given 
to nobody, not even his employer. Not that his pursuers would be distracted from finding 
him by such petty secrecy. Unlike Homo sapiens, the species his long-dead master Sarton 
had been wont to call the blossom on the simian tree, Chant's kind could not hide 
themselves from oblivion's agents by closing a door and drawing the blinds. They were 
like beacons to those that preyed on them.
  Men had it so much easier. The creatures that had made meat of them in earlier ages 
were zoo specimens now, brooding behind bars for the entertainment of the victorious ape. 
They had no grasp, those apes, of how close they lay to a state where the devouring 
beasts of Earth's infancy would be little more than fleas. That state was called the In 
Ovo, and on the other side of it lay four worlds, the so-called Reconciled Dominions. 
They teemed with wonders: individuals blessed with attributes that would have made them, 
in this, the Fifth Dominion, fit for sainthood or burning, or both; cults possessed of 
secrets that would overturn in a moment the dogmas of faith and physics alike; beauty 
that might blind the sun or set the moon dreaming of fertility. All this, separated from 
Earth-the unreconciled Fifth-by the abyss of the In Ovo.
  It was not, of course, an impossible journey to make. But the power to do so, which was 
usually-and contemptuously-referred to as magic, had been waning in the Fifth since Chant 
had first arrived. He'd seen the walls of reason built against it, brick by brick. He'd 
seen its practitioners hounded and mocked; seen its theories decay into decadence and 
parody; seen its purpose steadily forgotten. The Fifth was choking in its own 
certainties, and though he took no pleasure in the thought of losing his life, he would 
not mourn his removal from this hard and unpoetic Dominion.
  He went to his window and looked down the five stories into the courtyard. It was 
empty. He had a few minutes yet, to compose his missive to Estabrook. Returning to his 
table, he began it again, for the ninth or tenth time. There was so much he wanted to 
communicate, but he knew that Estabrook was utterly ignorant of the involvement of his 
family, whose name he'd abandoned, with the fate of the Dominions. It was too late now to 
educate him. A warning would have to suffice. But how to word it so it didn't sound like 
the rambling of a wild man? He set to again, putting the facts as plainly as he could, 
though doubting that these words would save Estabrook's life. If the powers that prowled 
this world tonight wanted him dispatched, nothing short of intervention from the Unbeheld 
Himself, Hapexa-mendios, the all-powerful occupant of the First Dominion, would save him.
  With the note finished, Chant pocketed it and headed out into the darkness. Not a